And in the castle was set a board
When the sun goes down in the subtropical forests of Puerto Rico, hundreds of thousands of bats emerge from the caves that stud the island’s northern end. After a day of sleeping, the animals are ready for a hard day’s night of hunting insects. For some of them, though, there will be no feast of beetles and mosquitos, and they’ll instead wind up a meal themselves for the snakes that have set up an ambush at the cave’s entrance. (…)
The nightly ritual is played out on its largest scale at La Cueva de Los Culebrones, or the Cave of the Long Snakes. The cave’s estimated 300,000 bats can empty out in as little as three hours, providing the boas with an all-you-can-eat bat buffet. Biologists observers have seen as many as 20 boas hanging around the cave entrance. (…)
Sometimes, a snake that’s not having any luck with its own hunting will attempt to steal a bat from another snake. On one occasion, a biologist watched three snakes fight over a large bat carcass for over an hour and a half.
